STOP THE PRESSES! CRIME RATES ARE FALLING

People hate crime, but the media love it.

Check out the newspapers. Listen to radio or watch television, even
the CBC.

Crime is bad, and bad news sells. Crime is emotional, and emotion
sells. Crime is abnormal, and the "news," as conventionally defined,
is something "new."

Politicians fear crime, not because they'll be victims themselves but
because they dare not explain crime sensibly. It's any politician's
nightmare to face a victim and utter anything other than a promise to
be "tough on crime."

So here is one of Canada's great divides. The media and political
elites have seldom talked more about crime, even as crime rates keep
falling.

Crime rates have been falling since 1991. They are now back at the
much lower levels of the late 1970s. There was a blip up in 2005 and
2006 for the most serious violent offences (homicides, attempted
murders, sexual assaults and robberies). Then the rates fell again in
2007, according to a Statistics Canada report last week.

Police-reported crimes were down everywhere except Newfoundland, Yukon
and the Northwest Territories. Toronto's media have been in a frenzy
to report crime, but Toronto turns out to have Canada's second-lowest
urban crime rate.

Youth crime dropped slightly in 2007. Homicides dropped. Car thefts
dropped. Residential break-ins dropped. Business break-ins dropped.
Sexual assaults dropped. Counterfeiting dropped.

In two areas, crime rates rose, but be careful with both. Drug
offences jumped 4 per cent, mostly because of cannabis possession
charges, not hard drug offences. Impaired driving rates increased 3
per cent, almost entirely because of a 19-per-cent rise in one
province, Alberta. Nationally, impaired-driving rates have been
falling for 25 years.

You want higher crime rates? Head west. The highest overall crime
rates occurred in Regina, Saskatoon, Abbotsford, Winnipeg, Edmonton,
Victoria and Vancouver. Saskatchewan has the country's highest overall
crime rate; Manitoba the highest homicide rate; British Columbia the
highest property crime rate.

The lowest rates are in Quebec and Ontario, although you would never
know it reading the provincial tabloids, the evening newscasts, radio
talk shows or even some of the "quality" papers.

Maybe this regional difference partly accounts for the Harper
government's fixation with toughening criminal justice. The
government's heartland lies in the West, where crime rates are higher.
Obviously, the government is focused on the small share of the
population that worries about crime.

Crime is worrying. Nobody wants to be a victim. There are terrifying
people among us, and petty thugs. Hard drugs do drive crime.

That crime rates have fallen is a statistic. A break-in or a sexual
assault or a murder is a human tragedy. And politicians respond to
human beings, not statistics.

Thinking it will make him or her popular, a politician can introduce
measures that make terrific headlines but are largely useless or
counterproductive, such as some of the Conservative policies on crime.

A lot of Western Canada's urban crime, for example, involves
aboriginal youth. Poverty, dislocation, unemployment, dead-end
reserves, family breakups and other social malaises have more to do
with these crimes than lax administration of laws, lenient judges or
the need for new "tough on crime" measures.

Mandatory minimum sentences for gun-related or other kinds of crime
are almost completely useless, although they certainly sound
frightening.

Why are crime rates falling? Now there's a fit subject for media
inquiry, although exploring it would be more difficult (and less sexy)
than reporting crimes, covering lurid trials or fulminating against
the latest outrage. Can you imagine a local television newscast (the
kind that follows the maxim "If it bleeds, it leads") starting the
news with a story about why crime rates are falling?

Maybe people are protecting themselves better. Maybe these statistics
are flawed because they reflect reported crimes, and many crimes go
unreported. Maybe lower crime reflects an older population. Maybe it's
smarter, better policing.

Or maybe we haven't been nearly as crime-ridden a society as the media
wants us to believe, and that politicians can't tell us not to believe.